In her opening scene she tames a runaway horse, prompting Q to remark: ‘She must take a lot of vitamins’. Jones threatened Bond’s masculinity and was – without doubt – one of the physically strongest characters. Although critics noted that Jones was ‘badly wasted’ by director John Glen and screenwriters Michael Wilson and Richard Maibaum, she featured heavily in the film’s promo, standing back to back with Bond under the tagline: ‘Has James Bond finally met his match?’ The short answer is yes. Roger Moore – in his final Bond role – was 57 years old and it showed, the plot was particularly farcical and even Christopher Walken couldn’t salvage the film his turn as baddie Max Zorin was particularly unconvincing. Jones is the high point in a mishmash of mediocrity. Whatever the reasons, it wasn’t until the 1980s that the character began to develop again, in the form of the powerful Grace Jones, playing May Day in A View To A Kill (1985). Perhaps the so-called backlash against the second-wave feminism movement scared Bond’s producers, or perhaps they thought the public wasn’t ready for a true female counter-part. But these independent agents who (on some level) embraced their sexual desires were short-lived, and in the 1970s Bond offerings, women were given much smaller, less deviant roles. Consider: in From Russia With Love (1963), German actress Lotte Lenya despatched her prey with a poison-tipped shoe in Thunderball (1965) villainous Luciana Paluzzi refuses to be seduced into ‘good’ behaviour. In the 1960s – and in line with changing attitudes from and towards women – Bond girls evolved. Although functioning as pure objects of pleasure, some of the early Bond girls can be considered to exist outside social norms, many rejecting (and liberated from) traditions such as family and marriage – although of course, they remain a façade, a 2D character that’s written purely to submit to the needs of a male. Consider that the earliest films pitch Bond as a serial seducer – there’s a direct link between his masculinity and sexual conquest, a bedroom success often marks the tipping point in a storyline. On the one hand, any female character that exists to ‘romance’ the hero and tumble into bed on a whim is clearly anti-feminist but, if the franchise is regarded as a whole, there’s a clear evolution of the ‘girl’ that runs parallel to changing attitudes to gender. Within the context of feminism, Bond girls represent something of a conundrum.
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